Finding Bugs

I've been looking at incorporating FindBugs into our project development. I've also been looking for a good profiler, preferably a cross-platform one I can plug into eclipse. In other news, I think I fixed the vdub-for-java only works once bug; now, instead of only working once per session, it can only decode one video at a time. I'll post Beta 2 sometime this weekend, I think, which should fix that, as well as a couple of dwrt bugs.

- posted by David @ 2:02 PM

Changes since Alpha 8

• Now records exceptions and stuff into ~/.viper/log.xml file, viewable with something like Chainsaw. This will aid in debugging greatly, as end users will now be able to send in stack traces without knowing what a stack trace is.
• A double-click on timeline titles selects that descriptor.
• Interpolation and propagation now 'propagate with respect to', with the shift of the 'display with respect to' attribute being applied to the interpolated/propagated descriptor as well.
• Keyboard events are now interpreted by the video canvas: this means that 'enter' ends a polygon, and 'delete' sets the current shape to NULL.
• Charles fixed oboxes and ellipses so they display the shape between the first drag and the completing click, instead of just the L-shape.
• Charles also has ctrl-editing of boxes; like drawing rectangles in powerpoint, it changes fixed point from the opposite corner to the center point.
• Added a 'create i-frame descriptor' feature in the edit menu. Right now, this only works with the jmpeg and vdub decoders, not using the Java Media Framework or Quicktime decoders. Info files and still images are reported as all-iframe.
• Can add a directory of images as a single file. Right now, this is a pretty primitive feature, accessible through the Media menu. It creates a .info file in the given directory that contains all files with a known image type suffix (it tests to see if java Image I/O's 'get reader by suffix' method returns non-null, not if it can actually read it) in whatever order java / the operating system chooses to list the directory. Since this is interpreted as a video, changing the order/contents of the info file by hand isn't really an option after the user has begun editing the ground truth file, so support for it must eventually be offered from within viper-gt.
• A wide variety of small bug fixes, including:
  • Uses less memory when interpolating, reducing likelihood of OoM error on large (>10000 frame) files
  • The time line now renders frame numbers better, and dragging lines snap to the right place
  • Charles has fixed a few things on the video display, like half-finished oboxes hanging around for the lifetime of the application
  • An annoying exception related to a bad interaction with autosave and most-recently-used files.
  • Deleted viper nodes (descriptors, attributes, etc) no longer maintain a link to their parent. This will fix some long-term bugs, at the expense of a few short term ones (like how putting a lock on the MRU/autosave caused that last bug).
  • A variety of fixes for add/remove files, in the menu and in the pop-up table-view media editor.

- posted by David @ 1:16 AM

Interpolate/Propagate Now Play Well with "Display with Respect To"

I modified the propagation/interpolation code so that propagating and interpolating now subtracts out the centroid of the shape that is currently marked as 'Display with Respect To'. This means that propagate behaves more predictably while Dwrt is active. Charles still has to get editing the target attribute working (right now, if you alter the Dwrt target attribute while the movie is playing, it really freaks out) and panning (right now, it keeps snapping back to the center if you try to drag the scroll bars or pan with the center mouse button), and then Dwrt will be working as well as we can hope for. I suppose we might want a 'turn off' menu item or toolbar button, too.

- posted by David @ 8:09 PM